gregjohn wrote:
> Is it illegal to put a povray CD in a magazine you sell for cash?

No.  For putting POV-Ray on a CD *in general* you must obtain written 
permission by the POV-Team.  But the distribution license contains an 
explicit exceptions for Open source Operating system distribution.  See:

http://www.povray.org/distribution-license.html

2.1. In return for the Distributor agreeing to be bound by the terms of
      this agreement, POV grants the Distributor permission to make a
      copy of the Software by including the Software in a generally
      recognised Distribution of a recognised operating system where the
      kernel of that operating system is made available under licensing
      terms:

       (a) which are approved by the Open Source Initiative
           (www.opensource.org) as complying with the "Open Source
           Definition" put forward by the Open Source Initiative; or

       (b) which comply with the "free software definition" of the Free
           Software Foundation (www.fsf.org).

2.2. As at June 2004, and without limiting the generality of the term,
      each of the following is a "generally recognised Distribution" for
      the purposes of clause 2.1: Debian, Red Hat (Enterprise and
      Fedora), SuSE, Mandrake, Xandros, Gentoo and Knoppix Linux
      distributions, and officially authorized distributions of the
      FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD projects.


It even mentions Knoppix explicitly!

Note this includes any commercial distribution (as long as the Kernel 
complies with 2.1.a ot 2.1.b.  This means that a Knoppix distribution 
containing POV-Ray could be sold, bundled with books/magazines/whatever 
without first obtaining permission.

I agree this is difficult to conclude from the license text but that's 
because of the well known fact that the license has been originally 
written when such things as Linux distributions did not exist and it had 
to be adapted without breaking the spirit of the original license (which 
has a strong emphasis on preventing to obscure the fact that POV-Ray can 
be used for free).

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ (Last updated 24 Jul. 2005)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

Post a reply to this message